Everybody's A Book of Blood

Max Ernst, The Temptation of St. Anthony 1945

"Everybody's a book of blood. Wherever we're opened, we're red."

--Clive Barker's Books of Blood

A night or two ago, I was thinking about how I'd explain, or better express the way I understand this very gory metaphor evoked in Barker's epigraph to the first volume of the Books of Blood. I always tend to think of and see an extended metaphorical expression as something active and animated in terms of the human imagination, instead of breathless and inanimate. His writing style is truly poetic to the very unconscious core, and it was in his stories that I was reminded of the shocking psycho-sexual, Freudian images of Surrealism--particularly having Salvador Dali (below) and Max Ernst (above) in mind. Barker's gory, yet literary elucidation above is like that of the Surrealist painters, whose paintings are never stilted with a stale expressiveness but shock quite animately with eldritch images revealing a deeper unconscious essence of being. I picture Barker as wanting the reader to envision a shape-shifting image in his or her own mind of a Daliesque body--a vivisection of violence: manuscript constituted by mutilated human parts--dismembered arms and hands tattooed with the ink of random sentences, flipping open its own pages made flesh, which are dripping with deep-sanguine blood, while reading.

Salvador Dali, Autumnal Cannibalism 1936